Try to not watchby Rob LevinePOSTED DECEMBER 13, 1997--Makers of cinematic films know they can count on the principle of
Suspension of Disbeliefthe idea that when people watch movies they
"pretend" to not see the holes in the plot, lack of continuity and other tips
that would prove the story to be unbelievable. Judging by the publics embrace of
local television news as their favoriteas well as their most trusted news
source, it appears this principle may also be at work every night at 10PM on the local
airwaves.

Perhaps no television news operation could possibly
prove this theory better than the KSTP (Channel 5) Eyewitness News 10PM show, which
is pretty much anything but the news people need to know. If a television critic was
looking for a perfect example of all the things that are wrong with television news, he
need look no further than the flying-pictures version of Hubbard Broadcasting known
as KSTP-TV.

Given the stations enormous journalistic breaches, listing
their transgressions is in itself a daunting task, but here goes: No one goes to larger
efforts to get emotion and violence onto the screen, and rational, meaningful humans off
of it. No other station distorts and confuses more stories, tugs more at the heartstrings,
shills more for itself, has replaced consumer reporting with consumerism reporting,
showcases its million dollar technologies in astoundingly ludicrous ways, ignores more
important and relevant stories, and commits other sins in such large volume.

Judging from their practice of dredging up old murders and mayhem
when theres none directly at hand, one can assume that over at Eyewitness News
the television adage, "If it bleeds it leads" has now apparently been
amended to include dried blood. This technique of picking at scabs works especially
well when stories blur the time frame of an actual event. On the Saturday, November 22
show newsreader Vineeta Sawkar breathlessly led the 10PM news with the story that "A
Twin Cities father is killed in this car crash!" Whats not revealed
until later is that the man was killed more than a year ago.

That year-old murder was followed up with another tale of
warmed-over violence, this one about a four month-old unsolved murder. The mayhem report
was finally rounded out with a third time-shifted story, this one about a two month-old
murder. These top three stories accounted for almost four and a half minuteshalf the
news hole-- yet not one of them appeared in the next days newspaper. I wont
bother you with the other tripe that appeared on that nights show, other than to say
that these werent the only violent (and/or old) stories that didnt appear in
the next days paper.

In fairness to them, trying to understand the nature of KSTP news
using the yardsticks of journalism is a little like trying to understand Las Vegas using
the standards of Ghandiit makes no sense. KSTPs sheer slavishness to ratings
makes attempts to correlate stories that appearand dont appearon their
broadcasts with news produced by more venerable sources fruitless in more instances than
not. Usually the emotional, titillating and violent stories near the top of an Eyewitness
News broadcast show up buried in the News Digest of the Metro section of
the paper. Other times reports are broadcast just because theyre easy to do, such as
Vineeta Sawkars compelling 30-second report on where Minneapolis residents could get
free sand for their sidewalks.

Emotional stories are made all the more poignant by the presence of
godly people, where the camera can zoom in on some icon of preferably Christian idolatry.
Usually these stories must place these holy men and women in a positive light, but if a
dark shadow is present, so much the better. I detected no fewer than five such stories in
the week of 10PM reports I viewed, including a report featuring the ubiquitous icon of
caring Mary Jo Copeland feeding Thanksgiving dinner to the poor, and a story I didnt
see anywhere else about a pedophile Archbishop living semi-secretly in Jackson, Minnesota
(where a cruel reporter put a nun into a situation where she seemingly had to lie.)

Brad nailedStrangest of all in the week of KSTP Eyewitness News at 10 PM was Joe
Schmits fawningly homoerotic pursuit of Vikings quarterback Brad Johnson. For a week
straight I endured Joe promoting or telling us about Brad Johnson. There he was stalking
Johnsons personal history in the quarterbacks home town of Black Mountain,
North Carolina, catching such nuggets as "Brad is King of the Mountain,"
from southern geezers. Later in the week Schmit was back in the studio, this time
ruminating about Brads bad ankle.

Not counting the endless promotion of their big story, the Vikings
quarterback was the focus of no less than seven minutes airtime. I detected a note of envy
in Schmits voice when they rolled the tape of Brad singing amid a bevy of
overdressed North Carolina teenagers in a high school talent contest. Things seemed okay a
little later when Joe gave us his take on Johnsons high school perm.

Despite
the egregious offenses of their news selection, KSTP isnt above making flat-out
errors of both substance and form. The night of the Rolling Stones concert at the
Metrodome, for example, newsreader Kalley King announced that a KSTP cameraman had
actually gotten into the show and shot the first song. At that point they rolled footage
obviously from a rock video, featuring various shots, including some from an on-stage
camera and some from a camera behind the stage.

Lets
just say that was an oversight on their part. What happened on the night of November 27th
was not so benign. Given a real story about a Washington County deputy being assaulted by
some poachers in Afton, KSTP, in a rush to hyperbole, announced with their lead story that
the deputy had received "a vicious beating," and, in a standup in front
of Regions hospital, intimated he was near death. Like other KSTP lead stories, this one
landed on page B3 in the Star Tribune, in the Briefs section, where the paper
reported that the officer was in fair condition, and the injuries didnt appear to be
life-threatening.

Emboldened by the previous nights successes, KSTP led their 10PM
news the very next night with the same story, only inexplicably the officer was now out of
the hospital, and resting at home. Not content with the emotional scale of the follow-up,
KSTP found some Aftonites to go on the camera and explain they had moved from the city to
"...get away from this stuff. If they did this to an officer, what would
they do to an ordinary citizen?" one white middle-aged guy complained over the
911 audiotape blaring: "Officer down, officer down!" Altogether, KSTP led
their news with this story two days in a row, for a total of five and half minutes of
airtime, almost a third of the total news hole.

Gathering an
audience with titillation and pander might be one thing, but cashing in on it is another.
To grease the wheels television stations have smashed the line (if there ever was one)
between advertising and editorial. Consider the Thanksgiving evenings
"News" story on Channel 5 detailing the store opening times of four large
retailers: Walmart, Daytons, Target and the Mall of America;
all but The Mall of America advertised on that very broadcast--even though they had
been the subject of a story the previous night on how not to end up looking like Willard
Scott from eating while shopping. This expose revealed that Mall food isnt really
that bad, and you can work off those calories by walking down the endless rows of stores!

Just in case we didnt get the message that we should get out and shop,
damnit, the same story featured Judy Cook of the Retail Merchants Association, who
reported that "Its a fun day to be out among the crowds. People seem to be
in a good mood." As opposed to shoppers in bad moods? As further enticement, Cook
suggested that "Theres a lot of really good promotions to take advantage of.
Its probably the best selection youll see (all year)."

Given the previous hectoring, I knew thered be a shopping
progress report the next day, and I wasnt disappointed. With the Skywitness Death
Star 5 hovering above, Vineeta Sawkar was on the spot at Rosedale with a two and a
half-minute report, informing us that "Today is kickoff day for the entire
shopping season." Looking for that unique shopper, Sawker found one who said
"I like to shop around and see exactly what I want to get." The Attack of
the Shopping Stories continued with a 20 second report telling us to make sure to have a
shopping plan, and concluded with 25 seconds of pictures from the Holidazzle parade in
downtown Minneapolis, where Conangla reminded us that the whole reason for the parade was
to get shoppers downtown.

Altogether over the three days of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday Eyewitness
News treated their viewers to over six and a half minutes of shopping stories, roughly
equal to one-quarter of the news hole.

Note that KSTP didnt abandon the rest of their usual approach
to the news on those nights, as they broadcast a total of over 16 minutes of crime/mayhem
in those same broadcasts, roughly two-thirds of the news hole. Another three minutes and
25 seconds went to coverage of the McCaugheys in Iowa, where Eyewitness News
had broadcast a story from the previous Saturday about how the media there was going home.

Ultimately, even when it seems KSTP may be trying to do something
good, they Frankenstein it into trash, such as their report about a violence prevention
program at Bloomington Kennedy High School aired Monday the 24th. Using the
vague language that signifies a weak story, Kalley King announced that "Despite
todays encouraging numbers about the drop in violent crime in Minnesota, there is
one forgotten crime, teen aggression on other teens " The promotion for the
story, which ran earlier in the same broadcast, declared that "Your
teenager could be the next target. Classmates sharing the school hallway between classes
could be planning a violent attack."

Two nights later the melatonin-challenged Unbearable Beings of
Whiteness at Channel 5 turned to media criticism. Eyewitness News anchor Chris
Conangla angrily led the 10PM news with the hot story that Newsweek magazine had
altered their cover photo to fix the teeth of litter-mom Bobbi McCaughey. Irony, being a
more refined idea, seemed to be totally absent when Conangla concluded
"Theyre a newsmagazine, theyre not supposed to be altering the truth, do
they regret it now?"

I wondered how many times KSTP
had altered the truth, or how many things they had to regret. Did they regret the
coarsening affect their crime-ridden broadcasts have on viewers? Did they regret
(wrongfully) scaring us about impending icy roads the whole week? Did they regret
presenting rock-video footage as their own? Did they regret aggrandizing the assault of
the Washington County Deputy? Did they regret slipping in covert "News" stories
that are really shills for advertisers on that very show? Did they regret that in their
week of broadcasting they had totally ignored otherwise huge stories, such as the Asian
financial meltdown, the environment, and city, state and federal governments?

And therein lies the rub. Maybe in the past people could just turn
off the tube and get their news elsewhere. The trouble is, most people wont get
their news anywhere else, and the most vulnerable among us are convenient prey to the
corrosive effects of gold-digging television "journalism." A report by the Media
Studies Center found that reliance on TV news goes down as educational attainment
increases. Conversely, the report found, just the opposite is true for non-television
sources of news and information.

Editors and content-gatherers alike are aware that they have turned
from producing journalism to producing titillating and ultimately meaningless filler to
punctuate the short space between automobile ads. They also suspect that viewers may be
aware of this downgrade as well, which is why KSTP employs a huge Promotions department,
angling to convince us that these really are news people, that these newsreaders
are just like you and I, and that theyre really on Our Side.

Try not to lookOf course, theyre fundamentally not on our side. As shown from their
content, theyre on their own side, and the side of their advertisers, even in
previously-hallowed areas like the newsroom. Yet, the same report found that people
inexplicably trust TV news anchors more than newspaper reporters, leading to the sad
conclusion that people are believing that this dangerous portrayal of the world on
stations like KSTP is in fact a mirror of the real world.

Viewers seem to buy this even when the news itself says that crime
and violence are down, such as the night of Monday, November 22, when KSTP broadcast the
story that, according to FBI reports, violent crime had fallen five percent in
Minneapolis, and two percent in St. Paul. Yet that very night KSTP contrasted the
falling-crime story with no fewer than six crime stories, including the Teen on Teen
Violence report.

When confronted with their sins, television executives often fall
back on the mantra that "Were only giving the people what they want." I
find it hard to believe that people, seeking real news about their world, want to simply
be scared and sold things. Closer to reality is the analogy to rubbernecking automobile
drivers who cant take their eyes off a highway wreck. And like the highway driver,
when our eyes are diverted from the road, whos to say which way well turn?